William R. Sutton. Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront Capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimore. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. xvi + 351 pp.
$36.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-271-01773-0; $94.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-271-01772-3.
William R. Sutton. Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront Capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimore. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. xvi + 351 pp.
Reviewed by Julia M. Walsh (Department of History, Politics, and Law, Webster University)
Published on H-Labor (February, 2000)
Labor historians have often urged each other to take
more seriously the role of religion in the lives of the
working class, but while many have called for this type
of analysis, few have taken up the call. Perhaps labor
historians feel nervous entering the world of intellectual
history or are worried about whether faith is an appropriate topic for social science. Yet important scholars of
labor, such as E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, show
the rich fruits to be gained from investigating workers’
religious words and thoughts. These studies take the intellectual world of workers as seriously as their material
world. William Sutton’s study shows once again the benefit of combining labor and intellectual history.
ter workmen and emerging capitalists, were class conscious or not. Indeed, the question of when artisans became workers (with all the class connotations that that
implies) is one often investigated in studies of labor in
this era. The second debate, discussed by scholars such as
Paul Johnson, is whether evangelicalism in this era was
a class-based phenomenon. While considering these issues, Sutton suggests that these in fact may not be the
central questions. Instead, he seeks to ask how employers and employees alike used their faith to understand a
world in which notions of status (and class) were in perpetual flux.
Chapter One uses a dramatic series of journeymen strikes in the early 1830s as a segue into the
tense, shifting world of antebellum Baltimore’s workplaces. The city was in a period of change as small
shops gave way to increasingly large-scale manufacturing establishments, shaking up mutualistic labor relationships between masters and journeymen artisans in
which “relatively equal power relationships” gave way to
new employer/employee-type relationships (29). Sutton
places this within the shift from a “producerist” society,
in which a product’s value lay in the labor needed to produce it, to a “liberal, capitalist” society in which the market determined value of both product and worker. Strikes
broke out over wage rates, working conditions, and outSutton’s work taps into two related debates in an- sourcing of less skilled parts of the production process
tebellum history. Scholars such as Sean Wilentz have to cheaper labor. This was especially prevalent in skilled
raised the question of whether antebellum artisans, who
professions such as coopering and hatmaking where inled strikes and riots but at other times were aspiring mascreased consumer demand gave master workmen the opJourneymen for Jesus is the complex but rewarding
story of the relationship between artisans and evangelicalism in the antebellum era. Looking predominantly at
one denomination in one city - namely Methodism in Baltimore - Sutton weaves together two related stories. The
first is the reaction of skilled artisans to the pressures of
modern liberal capitalism and the second is the changing
and often ambivalent role of evangelical religion within
that emerging new society. Joining these two tales together is a cast of evangelical workers whose interconnected vision of work and faith shaped their responses
to the market revolution.
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portunity to increase production and profit.
cies (which gave one a license to preach and the possibility of employment as a minister). The most radical dissenters or “populists,” as Sutton refers to them, also called
for women and African Americans to have more voice in
the denomination.
What Sutton highlights in this first chapter are the
religious metaphors and arguments developed by both
striking artisans and the master workmen they struck
against to explain their actions. The strikers protested
wages and conditions in moral as much as economic
terms. Most popular was the claim, based on Isaiah 3.15,
that the owners were “grinding the faces of the poor”
by lowering wages to a point where families could not
afford to eat. Sutton details how “traditional Protestant
morality and religious understanding of work were central to artisan culture” (31). Religion went far beyond
church attendance; labor was a sacred act and “greed”
an unchristian desire. Sutton reminds us that the Second
Great Awakening created an evangelicalism in which total submission to God’s will was followed by a new power
to improve oneself and society too. Thus, conversion
could provide the basis for artisan “activism regarding
the creation of godly social structures or oppositionalism
in the face of impious social constructions” (58). On the
other hand, this energetic evangelical individualism also
had the power to emphasize the “sacrosanctity of individual freedom” and to see acquisitiveness as manifestation
of an industrious nature. While this never reached the
“crass Social Darwinism” of upper-class Gilded Age evangelicalism, it provided master workmen and investors
with biblical license to embrace energetic capitalism (59).
Sutton raises a fundamental issue here - one that labor
historians interested in religion have struggled over. If
there were evangelicals on both sides of these labor disputes, did evangelicalism or even religion really make a
difference? The author suggests that it was this very fluidity that made evangelicalism such a powerful tool to
understand change in a “cultural environment still under
construction” (40).
Men like William Stockton, a bookseller, temperance
advocate, and sometime politician criticized the worldliness and greed of his own denomination. Representing
“evangelical populism at its purest,” men like Stockton,
often self taught and of humble means, felt called to be
preachers themselves but grew frustrated as they were
recommended for license by their congregations but refused again and again by the bishops (85). Matters came
to a head at the 1827 Annual Conference which met that
year in Baltimore. Part of the role of the conference was
for the bishops to examine current and prospective itinerants and make appointments for the coming year. When
the bishops rejected Dennis Dorsey, a outspoken, radical
itinerant, local populists were enraged, especially as the
decision took away the livelihood of a man with a family
to support.
Finally, the radicals broke from the church and decided to form their own denomination, the Methodist
Protestant Church. Yet, as Sutton shows, their efforts to
create a radical, producerist church were dashed. The exigencies of building and funding a new denomination led
the new church leaders to reevaluate issues of authority
and independence, as they accepted money from capitalists and sought “respectability.” To do so meant downplaying the role of women and minorities in the church,
and avoiding entanglement in controversial political or
labor issues. While the denomination flourished (spreading from Baltimore into Maryland, Ohio, and elsewhere),
the radical agenda of lay participation and egalitarianism
was lost.
Having fleshed out the complexity of evangelicalism
in the context of labor, Sutton shifts in the next two chapters to the religious arena and documents the development of a new denomination -Methodist Protestantism
- by frustrated populists within the Methodist Episcopal
Church. The ambivalence about “power and authority”
evident among religious artisans also existed within the
Methodist denomination. Despite its hierarchical church
structure, in which ministers were chosen by the powerful bishops, Methodism had an anti-authoritarian history
in America that appeared under threat in the 1830s as
the church became increasingly wealthy and respectable.
Dissenters in New York, Baltimore and other Methodist
centers criticized the lack of lay participation in decision making, particularly over the granting of itineran-
While these two fascinating chapters on Methodist
Protestantism highlight the tricky relationship between
radical populism and church building, it is not always
clear how this section fits into the main narrative. Sutton never makes clear who exactly joined the new church
and whether it included artisans, although this may
reflect a paucity of sources rather than any omission.
What is clear is that the men who eventually formed
the Methodist Protestant church used the same anticapitalist, producerist language as the city’s evangelical
artisans and experienced the same ambivalence about respectability and acquisitiveness.
Chapters Four and Five return the action to the
shopfloor, as Baltimore’s journeymen artisans renewed
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their organizing efforts in the late 1830s, and further explore the issues raised in the first chapter. Sutton is quick
to remind us that not all artisanal activity was oppositional and workers could be upwardly mobile too. Many
master workmen were sympathetic to the journeymen
and supported them in their strikes against unjust employers. Artisans, for their part, exhibited a real ambivalence toward their masters; it is too easy to talk of
a solid new class conscious anti-employer stance. For
example, on July 4, 1833, artisans held a party in Baltimore in which they toasted the masters. Just days later,
the hatters and cigarmakers went on strike against those
very same bosses. Artisans were torn between blaming
particular unjust individual masters for their poor working conditions and blaming the system of innovative capitalism itself. Producerist critiques increasingly “came to
describe an intrinsically immoral system, not just a collection of unjust individuals” (154). Customers, too, were
part of this oppressive new liberalism, and artisans lashed
out at consumers who simply bought the cheapest product without regard to the terms of production.
In the long term, Sutton notes, the riot helped the public
shift from fear of tyranny to fear of anarchy, and union
activity increasingly could be placed in the latter. Other
signs indicated that liberal ideas had permeated the cultural mainstream, replacing producerism as a unifying
ideal. The closed shop, one of the bases of the skilled
artisan system, seemed out of place and anti-competitive
in the increasingly capitalist society. Brotherliness also
appeared outdated, particularly if it hurt one’s own interests: in 1836, Baltimore artisans refused to help their
union brothers in New York City who had been imprisoned under new anti- union laws.
The new liberal respectability appeared to have
spread among artisan leaders themselves. Instead of the
usual parade and fund-raiser, the WMTU held a Fancy
Ball to raise money and invited many of the city’s civic
leaders. The ball was to raise money for a Society for the
Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Even though Bruce Laurie has suggested that these sort of educational organizations had a radicalizing potential, Sutton sees the Baltimore society, as well as the ball itself as indication of the
increasing respectability of union leadership. The political successes of some Baltimore artisans also distracted
artisanal leaders from the unions, suggesting that politics
rather than union organizing might be the way to effect
change. Even before the Panic of 1837, the unions, particularly communal efforts like the WMTU, declined as a
popular oppositional force.
In response to such an unjust system, workers began
to organize in Baltimore, most notably in the multi-trade
Workingmen’s Trade Union (or WMTU), which had parallels in New York and Philadelphia. The WMTU showed
remarkable brotherhood throughout the early 1830s, as
artisans supported fellow workers in other trades during
strikes. The city’s printers, for example, printed leaflets
for striking hatters. Occasionally, brotherhood extended
to sisters too, as male tailors supported striking seamstresses in the city in 1833. The seamstresses also used
the language and morality of evangelical producerism
as they complained that they deserved a living wage as
many were widows and entirely responsible for their
families.
The final pair of chapters review the relationship between artisan struggle and evangelicalism, and show the
legacy of evangelical artisanal culture in the changed
economic and social climate of the 1840s. Chapter Five
pulls together evangelical church building and artisanal
struggle to ask what exactly was the role of evangelicals
in the trade unions and other organizations, and, conversely, what was the role of artisans within their denominations. Sutton reiterates that the inherent values necessary for both evangelical church builders and organizing trade unions -“self discipline, character-building, deferred gratification, ethical economic behavior, and consideration of the larger good”- were the same (218). He
also notes how scholars have seen habits of “frugality, industry and punctuality” as top down values imposed by
capitalists to create docile, hardworking employees (219).
Sutton’s own study indicates that these values were as
much bottom up as top down.
But the WMTU worked within the increasingly fractious political atmosphere of Jacksonian Baltimore. By
the mid-1830s, after victories for the Ten Hour Day and
other improvements, artisans moved into politics and at
the same time ruptured their solidarity. Matters came to
a head in August, 1835, as a four day riot broke out in the
city in response to the collapse of the Bank of Maryland.
Rioting crowds attacked bank directors and their homes,
and several people were killed in shoot- outs in the city’s
streets. The WMTU was not involved in any official way
and artisans were present both in the rioting crowds and
in the volunteer police force who tried to stop them. But
Evangelical artisans were ambiguous about their self
the riot had an impact as artisans divided over the conidentification
within their denominations. Sutton uses
troversial issue of whether the state legislature should reColumbia
Street
Methodist Episcopal Church, built in the
imburse the wealthy bank men who had lost their homes.
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early 1840s, to illustrate this ambivalence. Artisans asked
the denomination for help establishing a new church in
this working-class part of the city. Church leaders grudgingly established a mission church there in 1840, but the
members chafed at being considered a mission of a richer
church and pushed for independence. Within a few years
the church was self-supporting and a 1841 revival was led
by artisan preachers: evidence that the artisans asserted
“control of their collective life”(223).
and individual moral salvation took on a new importance.
But Sutton ends by suggesting that the ideas and language of collective producerism could still have powerful
resonance. Even in the throes of Gilded Age monopoly
capitalism, producerism, particularly religious producerism, undergirded the Knights of Labor, Populism, and
even “Debsian socialism” (316).
This is a fine work, with much for readers interested in the nineteenth century, labor, or religious culture to ponder. At times, the structure of the book is
hard to follow. We might have been given more of
an overview at the start, particularly to help the reader
understand the chapter pairings. The strength of the
work is Sutton’s skill in uncovering the artisan’s religious
world; his familiarity with the language and metaphors
of evangelicalism allow him to interpret language and
see connections that other labor historians, less trained
in nineteenth-century biblical exegesis, might miss. And
he is helped by the richness of his sources; discourse in
evangelical Baltimore was played out in variety of extant newspapers, newsletters and pamphlets. Of course,
these sources have their limits, telling us, for example,
little about the religious worlds of women and African
Americans, some of whom were both artisans and evangelicals.
Refocusing his attention on the role of these evangelicals in trade unions, Sutton, again focusing on the
Methodists, attempts to count how many evangelicals
joined such organizations. As any scholar who has attempted to match church membership lists with other
sources knows, this can be a frustrating task. The records
are fragmentary, but Sutton pulls together church lists,
newspapers, personal papers, and union records, to show
that many leading union activists, as well as many master workmen, were indeed evangelicals. In an interesting section, the author shifts from journeymen artisans
to factory workers. The most important industrial development in 1840s Baltimore was the rise of large-scale
textile factories on the edge of the city. These mills have
been usually seen as ripe grounds for paternalistic owners to inculcate workers with appropriate religious messages of obedience and hard work. Yet, they were also
a place for radical, populist evangelicals to reach out to
a working-class audience, and Sutton’s research shows
that oftentimes textile workers chose humble, workingclass preachers over more elite ministers, and employers
unquestioningly footed the bill. As such, “nascent factory paternalism…was more complex than the mere rationalization of exploitation” (245).
Recent events such as the protests outside the World
Trade Organization meeting in Seattle show that even in
our world of seemingly omnipotent global capitalism, labor and other activists are still rethinking the relationship between capitalism and morality. Sutton’s artisans
used their evangelical world view to confront capitalism;
today’s protesters have more diverse though perhaps less
coherent ideologies with which to face the inequities of
But the capitalist developments that brought the tex- contemporary capitalism.
tile mills to Baltimore, as well as the economic upheavals
(A quick final word about the look of the book. It
of the Panic of 1837, put artisans under deep financial
has
a number of minor but annoying typographical errors
pressure. By the 1840s, the union movement had been
that
a copyeditor could easily have fixed. But the press
shattered by economic hardship and evangelicals began
more than redeems itself by the inclusion of a wonderful
to move their religious focus from collective producerist
set of engravings of artisans at work which begin each
equality at the workplace to the issue of the moral individual. A new vision of “church communities serv- chapter [though unfortunately, I could not find a citation
ing members as havens from the vicious dislocations of for them].)
metropolitan industrialization” emerged, and workingCopyright 2000 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This
men’s trade unions were replaced with workingmen’s work may be copied for non-profit educational use if
temperance and Sabbatarian organizations (258). Tem- proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other
perance was a particular concern; the economic stress permission, please contact [email protected].
of the decade has increased alcoholism among workers,
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at:
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Citation: Julia M. Walsh. Review of Sutton, William R., Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront Capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimore and William R. Sutton, Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront Capitalism
in Jacksonian Baltimore. H-Labor, H-Net Reviews. February, 2000.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3806
Copyright © 2000 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
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